Automation Anywhere Reviews

When I started working with Automation Anywhere, I automated mutual fund statements. Later, I switched to a financial services company, so that involved a lot of monotonous rule-based work that we had to automate. Then, I started working for this oil and gas company. We focus on finance, procurement, IT, legal, and refining processes. 

I've seen business users doing this kind of repetitive work for 20 years, and they feel that there is a better use of their labor, so I wanted to automate things for them. For example, in the oil and gas industry, we need to extract information from purchase orders that we must pay out on invoices to various contractors. It's possible to improve efficiency by as much as 20 to 30 percent by automating those processes. We can do even better by asking the right questions to the business stakeholders. There's potential to automate and improve on things they've done manually in the past. 

We see opportunities to operationalize AI for HR use cases. For example, we need to gather documentation for work travel, including a visa if an employee plans to travel abroad. Instead of having an employee ask HR folks about the process, we can set up something with generative AI. AI would also be helpful in some finance use cases. We still need to do some PoCs for generative AI before moving forward. Our data science team is working with something similar, but I haven't used it yet, so we need to try some smaller PoCs before trying it at a larger scale. 

Automation Anywhere saves money. At my previous employer, we achieved $1.3 million in cost avoidance over two years. I expect to realize that much savings in my current role, but we are still in the enabling phase of our CoE. Next year, we'll complete large-scale automation. That's our goal.

UI and document automation are two features I like. Document automation is helpful because it simplifies extracting and putting data into different ERP systems. I have three or four use cases for document automation. I also like the recorder objects feature, which was called object learning in the previous version, and screen scraping. 

It's easier for business users to work with Automation Anywhere A360. My previous employer used Automation Anywhere version 11, which was sometimes a little difficult. A360 is much more interactive. We have several users in our organization who have a business background, so it takes some time with some of the use cases. A business user might take two months to build more challenging use cases, whereas a developer could do it in three or four weeks. Though it takes longer, we want them to learn and implement Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere is interactive, and my experience with my coworkers has been positive so far. I'm on the CoE team, and we've been working to enable various functions involving the HR, IT, finance, and refining teams. They are using it. On average, it takes a month or so to train them, build their use cases, and put them into production. 

The solution is currently integrated with PeopleSoft, ServiceNow, and SAP. The document integration gives us about 70-80 percent accuracy. We're mostly working on purchase orders, but I want to implement it for financial use cases, too. I'm trying to determine what the most efficient one is. 

When we need to upgrade the bot version for various applications like SAP, the compatibility issues could be easier to resolve. The financial team is using version 5 or 6, but the automation engineer recommends only version 6 because it is more compatible. I think Automation Anywhere could handle these compatibility issues better. 

I have used Automation Anywhere for nearly seven years now.

Automation Anywhere is scalable, but it depends on what you do during the design phase. You must consider the opportunities for scaling up while you're planning. It's easy to scale if done correctly. 

I rate Automation Anywhere support nine out of 10. It's excellent. We have premium support. Our account manager is very nice. If we raise an issue, it will be resolved the next day. 

Positive

We also have Power Automate, but we do not use it at the enterprise level. We only use Power Automate for two use cases. A different team uses Power Automate, but they are not associated with the CoE. They are only using it for personal automation. 

Deployment is easy, but the testing takes time. It also takes some effort to migrate the bots from version to version, like v11 to the cloud version of A360.   We learned it the hard way, but once we moved to A360, that took care of many of the infrastructure issues we faced with the on-prem version. It was mostly some technical challenges, not infrastructure-related changes. The cloud version is much better than the on-prem. 

Automation Anywhere requires maintenance, but how you develop the processes also matters. We try to implement best practices, like using wildcards instead of URL names. That's why we try to find ways to make API calls instead and get the data from there. We are currently doing a PoC that involves retrieving the data from third-party websites, and they told us that they could build an API that would make it easier to maintain. The APIs work better than redirects. 

I tried UiPath, but I didn't like it as much for our current use case. Automation Anywhere is a better fit, but I have used UiPath at three organizations as a contractor, consultant, and full-time employee. 

I rate Automation Anywhere 10 out of 10. 

Automation Anywhere is an RPA tool. The use case is the same for all automation tools. In my most recent project, I've used it for three-way invoice matching and sending it to the accounts for verifications. The process was a mixture of IQ bot, which is an OCR from Automation Anywhere, and then other RPA bots. 

I've used it in health care, where people apply for insurance applications to the insurance companies. 

I have implemented more than five hundred use cases as of now.

It's helped manage repetitive processes. If there's a repetitive process, that is our best use case, and we can pitch to the customer that we can make it shorter. Then we save them man hours and increase their efficiency and accuracy. 

For example, mostly in finance, when companies are preparing the salaries and have to prepare 1,500 payments for employees, sometimes they make mistakes, and they have to spend time on that. 

We can instead provide a fixed format for the robot that they have to follow every month, and it saves a lot of time, a lot of man hours. One of our customers here in the Middle East has saved around 10,000 man-hours for a telecom company with the help of 50 to 60 robots initially, and now the same company is using around 4,000 robots now. 

It helps save time on manual tasks. Compared to manual input, the results are much better, faster, and more accurate. For example, we have clients that can now easily process 10,000 invoices in one day. They have around 55 employees for that. We can augment the workload with a root, and if an employee wants to take a holiday or needs sick leave, other employees don't have to pick up the slack. Robots can input information into the system. 

The era of automation has changed. It's time for hyper-automation now. RPA is moving from just handling repetitive tasks to allowing for AI and offering automation plus conversational AI. It will help me. Soon I will be able to use it in WhatsApp, and all of the information can be entered, and you can initiate appointments, et cetera. RPA plus conversational AI plus AI-enabled OCR systems will be the future. 

There are a lot of great features, especially the IQ bot. It has very good accuracy on invoices. Previously, we were dependent on different software, and now, we can build in Automation Anywhere only.

It's easy to use for non-technical people. It's not rocket science. A business user might take a few weeks or a month to learn it, and then they will be quite capable of doing things themselves. A technical person may learn it in 15 days. Everything needs time; however, the learning curve is not so bad. A lot of things are available to help with learning. If someone spends one or two hours a day, they will pick it up. You can Google information or watch YouTube videos. There are hundreds of demos, materials, and more free of cost.

We do use CoPilot. We try to build a center of excellence with all customers, and we're giving them training around any bottlenecks they have.

The solution has helped us increase productivity. How much of an increase differs from customer to customer. Usually, it improves by 20% to 30%.

There's lots of integration possible. We've integrated with business tools like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. We can integrate easily into various workflows and APIs. We can access APIs with just a few clicks. We can also build out a UI-based integration.

It's helped us save time. Every customer saves a different amount of time, percentage-wise. Some can save hundreds of hours.  I've had a client save 30% of their time over the past few years thanks to automation. 

There is a dependency issue around the control room. If the control room is not working, the bots will not work. When that happens, we have to wait for the control room to go back up. Other tools in the market do not have this issue. If something is down, it means everything is down.

I've been using the solution for three years now. However, I've worked with automation in general for six years. 

The solution is stable. It's good software. It works well. 

The product scales well. 

Technical support is good; however, sometimes it takes a while to solve problems.

Positive

I previously was using UiPath. It's quite easy to use. They are both very similar solutions. 

I was mostly involved in the infrastructure, so I was not directly involved in the deployment. My understanding is that it is not difficult. However, when we upgraded it, we had challenges. 

There is some maintenance required. Normally, it works fine. Sometimes, there may be migrations or updates required. Only one or two people need to handle maintenance. We don't maintain bots. However, we just deploy them. Maintenance can be completed by the customer, and it might take five to six hours or one day at a maximum. 

Compared to Microsoft, the solution is expensive. However, compared to UiPath, it's fairly low - maybe 25% less. Generally, within the market, the price is average. It's competitive.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We're a reseller. 

I am working with an integrated resort. It is a hotel with a casino in Singapore. There are about 130 manual processes that we have automated touching the front office, call center, back of the house, finance, facilities, and casino areas as well. We have automated scheduling and workforce planning. 

My business is divided into what we call gaming and non-gaming space. It is an integrated resort. We started out by automating use cases from the non-gaming area. In the third year, we started venturing out a little bit into the gaming area. We did not go into the heavy gaming areas such as on the casino floor. We went for support processes at the back of the house, which included scheduling and things like that. We are also doing reporting. 

Most of what we have is for attended and unattended bots. We have just started to use Co-Pilot or what used to be known as AARI. It is something new for us, and we have only one process using that. It is a pilot project. It is something new that we started now in our fifth year.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption. It has helped the business address some of the pain points. It has helped the business understand that there are other ways of doing things and getting out of the manual processing. We come from a heavily people-oriented industry. We are into hospitality where you need the human touch for our business. We are not a bank. We are not a financial institution. The mindset change that I have seen with my business stakeholders because of the automations that we are doing for them is a plus. It is a game changer. In our first year of doing this, we started out very small. I had a team of myself and one developer, and now, in our fifth year, we have over 130 bots touching over 40 business units. I now have a team of four people, so we have grown. We now have a culture or ecosystem where the business stakeholders know that if they are still doing something heavily manual and highly repetitive, and it is not adding any real value to the time of the team member, there is a team within the organization that they can approach. This team will help with whatever pain point they have or take that task out of their day-to-day work so that they can concentrate on higher-value activities. This whole mindset or this whole culture or ecosystem is now there in the company. Automation Anywhere has helped elevate the consciousness of the organization by realizing that there is an automation world out there, and we can bring solutions to the table for their problems and use cases.

When it comes to integration, we have been lucky so far. We use many applications. The processes that we have automated touch 30 to 40 applications that we have in-house. It is seamless. It is fine, but some of the third-party applications that we are trying to integrate with are not necessarily very automation-friendly. The objects of those third-party applications are always changing, and therefore, we constantly have to rescript, but that is not necessarily Automation Anywhere's problem. That is just the nature of the other third-party applications that may not necessarily want you to be automating or layering on top of their systems and get behind their applications. I have been lucky so far. We have not had to go back to a business and say that we cannot automate their process because Automation Anywhere cannot integrate with a particular application. I have not had that experience as of now.

The learning curve of Automation Anywhere for my own team was pretty good. If you are a full-on developer, it is one of the easier tools to learn in the market. It is pretty good as long as this is something that you are using regularly. If you are a dedicated person doing the development and working with the tool, it is very easy to use. As far as my developers are concerned, it is very easy. We are able to turn around projects or use cases in three to four weeks. For even complex ones, there is a fairly good turnaround time in terms of delivering to our stakeholders. We do not train nontechnical people on its use. Businesses only receive automation from us, so they are not trained on it. If they are going to be trained on it, it is only on how to run their bots, and that is a part of our production development checklist or lifecycle that we give them. It just takes a day or two because we only teach them how to run their bots. It is delivered to them. We do all the installation on their machines. We set up their machines, and then we teach them how to run the bots.

When we first engaged with them, we thought that we could easily go into what we refer to as a citizen developer type of framework, but that did not go too well. We rely heavily on the CoE team, which is my team, to do automation. We have a build and support model for our business users. Business users are only taught how to run their bots. We do not teach our business users how to build a bot. We tried that and did some training with some key business stakeholders. It was a three-day training, but it did not prove to be too successful. After the training, they go back to their business units, and if it is not the core or what they do on a day-to-day basis, it is very hard to sustain, so the main building and the heavy lifting came back to the CoE team. Our team delivers to business units. From that perspective, I would rate Automation Anywhere a three out of five. Business users cannot just go ahead and build their own bots without really learning and understanding the tool.

The whole suite of RPA modules that they have is very good. They have three environments in which you can do your automation. You have development, staging, and production environments. These are run by licenses as well, which is very good. There are a lot of ways of automating processes with this application. I am not a developer. I run the RPA CoE team. I have a team that does the actual development, so I cannot speak of features per se, but the whole RPA module that they have is one of the best in class.

It is easy to use. When you need to make changes to your automation, it is quite quick. You do not need to go through the whole script. You can do it in modules or subtasks.

There are several things. They can improve their billing. I have had issues with their billing.

Their license model needs to be improved. The biggest issue for me is that the license is tied to a person, and it is not something that I can pass if I want to use it for the first five hours and pass it on to you for the next five hours and so on. When we automate, the license is tied to me, and if you or somebody else needs to use that license, as a COE administrator, I need to transfer the license from person A to person B. This is something that I have always told them that should not be this way because you want to utilize your licenses effectively. You want to ensure that your utilization of licenses is maximized throughout the organization because you are paying on a per-license basis. If it is tied to a person or to an AD account, how can you pass on that license to others to use if they are from other departments? If there is one big thing that they could change in terms of the subscription model for a license, it would be that it should be concurrent and not tied to a user.

In terms of the product, they can improve the upgrades. They are in A360, which is the cloud version. They went from version 11 to A360, and there are new updates and features all the time. Sometimes, these upgrades break other things that were working previously. We have found out that there are some bugs that are going on with the updates. Because they are on the cloud now, they do every quarter some kind of upgrade or patch.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for the past five years. We started out in 2018. I was scouting around the market for an RPA vendor. I am based in Singapore, and after doing a study of top vendors at that time, I decided to go with Automation Anywhere. We are now in our fifth year of engagement with them.

Automation Anywhere is very good at providing automation at scale. We have about 130 bots. They absolutely have the ability to scale for me. Their platform is geared towards that. It is all license-driven, and it is quite easy to scale using this tool. The infrastructure is dependent on us as a company, and making sure that our environment is ready for all the builds that we need to do, the development that we need to do, and the rollouts that we need to do, so there is a handshake between the company and the tool. It is not very complicated once you get the rhythm and once you get your governance going. It is quite good.

I contacted their technical support when some of the functionality broke because of an upgrade or the functionality did not seem correct. In some of those cases, as a client, we were the ones who told them about an issue or a bug in a particular feature. We appreciate that they came back and said that it is correct, they are aware of it, and it is going to be fixed in the next release. We have had a couple of those kinds of instances.

I would rate their support a seven out of ten because we had issues with them in terms of response and in terms of trying to get to the root cause of a problem. We had just migrated to A360. We were on version 11, and we had to switch over because it was going to be end-of-life or end-of-support. They were pushing all their clients to move to A360. In the beginning, my team had to tell their team that these are some of the issues that their A360 tool has and these are some of the bugs. They were a bit slow to react and get to a resolution or root cause.

Also, in the beginning, we were communicating with so many people. There was no continuity in terms of the person handling the ticket. They might have been changing shifts, but when you leave clients to repeat themselves to a new set of people they are talking to overseas, it gets a little bit annoying. I did highlight this point to their management team, and ever since I did that, their support team started handling the account a little bit better, but that is the reason why I am giving them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We were not using any other solution previously. It was our first foray into robotic space. We have been with Automation Anywhere ever since.

Our setup is hybrid. Our control rooms are on the cloud. We are on A360, so our control rooms are on the cloud, but our bots runners are on-premises.

I was involved in its deployment. When we did this at the initial stage in 2018, it was pretty straightforward. They provided great support. We started out by doing eight processes as a pilot. 

Their team provided the developers because I had no developers on my end at that time. Their team did it remotely. They were probably doing it from India. They gave us the requirements. They educated us on what was needed and how we needed to set it up so that they could connect to whatever systems they needed for the eight processes or use cases that I had chosen. They did deliver all those processes within two weeks, so it was pretty straightforward.

Their professional services team was top-grade. They knew what they were talking about, and the people that they gave me in Singapore at that time were very good.

In terms of maintenance, it does not require any maintenance from my end. They do a quarterly patch of it. They announce that they are doing a patch, and it gets done. There is no maintenance on my end for the tool. What I need to maintain are the bots that we have built for the business. That is where the maintenance is, but that is more on our end. That is mostly because the bots break because of the change in third-party applications. 

They had about two or three developers doing the work remotely. There was a salesperson who was based in Singapore, and then they had sent two people from India to come over to Singapore to handle the account in terms of education. We had a program manager as well as a solution architect.

Five years ago, we looked at UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and WorkFusion. We did the scoping in terms of SWOT analysis, and we found Automation Anywhere to be a better partner to work with and a more stable one in 2018. 

To those evaluating Automation Anywhere, I would say that make sure they give you somebody who really knows the tool and they explain the RDLC and the delivery method to you clearly in terms of what you need to set up within your company before you engage. You need to ask the questions because it sounds simple, but it is not that simple, so you need to ask what are the things that you need to have in place in your own organization so that it is a successful rollout.

I was sold on the idea that it is an easy tool to use. Anybody can do it. They do not need to be full-stack developers. Our regular team members can pick it up, but as I got into it, I realized that is not true. Not everybody can do this. You need to have a developer mindset. You need to know how to code. It is not something that anyone can do. That was one thing that I had to learn the hard way. I realized that this model is not going to work for my company, so you need to ask questions. Understand the tool, and make them do a deeper demo in terms of how to build a bot or a complicated process. Do not go with a simple and easy process. If it is of medium complexity, find out how a regular person would do that. Ask them, for instance, what would you need to get this going. Understand the tool and spend more time with the tool before committing.

To someone who wants to use an API integration instead of a robotic process automation (RPA) solution, I would say that if you are doing it through API calls, it is a better way to go. It is more stable because you are doing it from the backend. You are getting connections there rather than using RPA from a front-end perspective.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten.

I am striving to provide individuals with more time to focus on value-add tasks due to widespread headcount reductions. For instance, in finance and accounting activities, we use Automation Anywhere to replace individuals in maintenance tasks or those that were previously unknown to be time-consuming. This is where we witness the greatest utilization of bots. 

Moreover, we employ bots to handle fines associated with individuals driving company cars. With hundreds of fines occurring each month, it used to be a nearly full-time responsibility for one person to receive the fine, identify the driver at the time of the incident, and ensure the fine was directed to the appropriate person for payment. Such activities lacked significant value and consumed a considerable amount of time for someone, but now the bot handles these tasks on our behalf. I believe that finance is the primary area where we extensively utilize Automation Anywhere.

When we began deploying the bots, we established Key Performance Indicators to assess the return on investment. For instance, if a bot could save one-third of an individual's time, we would evaluate the amount of time saved and dedicate it to value-add tasks. However, evaluating the exact monetary savings facilitated by the bots is challenging because the funds are not directly spent on low-value activities. Instead, they can be utilized differently. 

It is important to note that the bots never completely replaced human workers. No job was entirely taken over by a bot. Rather, it was an assessment of how effectively we spent money with the assistance of bots, as they enabled individuals to perform tasks more efficiently. Although I don't recall the exact details since it was in the past, we would reassign the equivalent of full-time employees to these value-added tasks instead of low-value ones. At the time of my departure from the RPA topic, we had 150 bots in production, and we had a clear understanding of how many full-time employees would be dedicated to higher-value tasks as a result.

The ability of Automation Anywhere to provide automation at scale is commendable. We have indeed achieved tangible business benefits. That is certain. I am no longer aware of the metric used to evaluate this, except for the fact that we have eliminated various mundane activities from the workday of numerous individuals.

Automation Anywhere has helped our organization increase its automation consumption.

From what I recall of the type of issue we had to deal with when we started implementing Automation Anywhere, it was the integration with the identity and access management system that the company might use. This is because Automation Anywhere has a vault where we store all the information related to the bot, including the password it will use to connect to the system. The feature, which might be interesting for companies that don't already have an identity management system, was a bit tricky because I would have preferred the system to directly rely on our corporate identity and access management system to manage the bot's credentials. This way, we wouldn't have to store this information in the bot as well. It's something to consider in terms of integrating with an existing IT landscape.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for almost six years.

We did not encounter any stability issues with Automation Anywhere during the time I worked with the solution.

Automation Anywhere is scalable.

The technical support was helpful and responsive.

Positive

We had previously been using UiPath, and in late 2017, we acquired an organization that was already using Automation Anywhere, which belonged to a much larger organization. Consequently, we began to explore that tool and benefited from our colleagues' positive experiences with Automation Anywhere.

They were able to provide suggestions on the setup and deployment of the solution. As a result, we ultimately decided to discontinue the use of UiPath and transitioned to Automation Anywhere. Without the acquisition, we might not have implemented Automation Anywhere and instead would have continued with UiPath or explored other alternatives. Due to the acquisition, we were able to recognize that Automation Anywhere was one of the market leaders and swiftly create a proof of concept.

The initial setup was straightforward. Although I was involved in the deployment project, the actual installation was carried out by those responsible for implementing the Windows servers.

We needed to acquire the hardware because we had an internal cloud at that time, so we still have it. I would say that we managed to allocate the servers. It didn't take long. We provided training for the people who would deploy and customize the product with the assistance of Automation Anywhere in France. The global deployment infrastructure was ready to be used within a few weeks.

The implementation was completed in-house with the help of the Automation Anywhere team.

We obtained benefits from the original price prior to the acquisition and had to engage in negotiations due to the expansion of the usage scope. We were required to purchase licenses and bot runners, which determined the permissible run times for the bots. We successfully achieved a fair price worldwide. 

I rate Automation Anywhere an eight out of ten. 

We primarily utilize an attended bot, meaning they are not created by users. We have made efforts to retain control over IT in bot creation to prevent it from becoming a new avenue for shadow IT. When we started in 2018, the final department had a dedicated team responsible for bot development. However, they eventually hired contractors who developed C-Sharp programs that interacted with SAP through APIs. The bot would simply launch these programs, which is not the ideal method for automation, as we believe the bot should directly interact with the application instead of relying on a separate program to communicate with SAP through an API. I believe the team responsible for this no longer exists. Presently, we have a process in place to identify relevant use cases, and we are collaborating with a subcontractor who creates the bots for us based on specifications provided by the business.

We utilize Automation Anywhere with an attended bot. This implies that after receiving the specifications from the business and creating the purchase, we establish an agreement on the bot's scheduling for execution. However, the user never directly interacts with the bot; they only observe the results of its actions. Therefore, there is no need to provide training for users to utilize Automation Anywhere. We maintain IT control over it, while the development itself is outsourced. Consequently, the issue of the learning curve is not applicable to our situation.

We didn't use a lot of APIs with Automation Anywhere. Instead, we simulated the user's actions on the application's user interface. I can't recall any instances where we relied on APIs to initiate actions in the systems we were connecting to. However, I am aware that APIs can be utilized. There was a point when we wanted to employ APIs to retrieve the password or the bot from our identity and access the financial system just before the bot was about to commence its task. Additionally, we intended to trigger an API to reset the password once the bot had completed its job to ensure that there were no potential security threats associated with the user IDs used for the bots.

For those who prefer using API integration instead of a comprehensive process automation solution, I would like to emphasize that it's not exactly the same approach. Integrated APIs require developing a program for them to interact with. In my opinion, RPA offers a more straightforward approach as it simply replicates user actions within an application. We already have a ready-to-use bot. However, I wouldn't recommend using bots for everything, especially when we encounter use cases that resemble interfaces. 

Essentially, it involves manipulating the user interface of an application to extract data and then sending that data to another application on a daily basis. This approach doesn't seem logical. I'm not sure about the usage of APIs in the context of actual IT program development, where we need to retrieve data from various source systems that provide APIs. In such cases, we genuinely desire bots that faithfully mimic the actions of real users within an application. Our intention was never to replace any kind of deployment with bots, which is why we wanted Information and Communication Technology to be involved in the decision-making process. We wanted to ensure that the distinction was made between tasks that should be handled by bots and those that should be treated as interfaces or programs, aligning with our understanding of process automation.

We have a team of three people in Spain who are in charge of the daily operation of the Automation Anywhere platform. However, deploying our new bot is a quick process. There is a test environment where the bot is validated, after which it is transferred to the production control room and the bot's schedule is updated.

The team responsible for the data operations of the platform, taking everything into account, including the intrusion of the new bot into the production environment. They also handle the platform's maintenance. I believe we have three individuals dedicated to these tasks.

We are supposed to produce 40,000 components of shells for bayonet caps. Forty thousand caps are required in each shift, which means it comes to about 120 caps per minute. For that purpose, we make use of the vibrating feeder and inserts for all the shoots. We also had composite tools to perform various operations. The additional components, which are supposed to come on the rotary table, were also finished and brought to the table. The shell gets placed from the vibratory feeder on top of it. There are two operations: hot white glass falls into it, and as soon as it falls, it goes to the next position, where it gets molded. The molding shape takes place.

Actually, we are supposed to produce 40,000 components of shells for bayonet caps. Forty thousand caps are required in each shift. That means it comes to about 120 caps per minute. Automation is going to become a new area we will certainly encourage a lot of people to pursue because of the lasting dividends it provides, including saving time and manpower.

I have not come across them. Automation Anywhere is a company that keeps sending their literature very often. I possess it, and I am getting good information through them.

Normally, I go through a lot of journals that provide a lot of information on automation. Practically, I have done a lot of work, which gives me the confidence that I can handle any type of automation.

You only give instructions to them regarding what is required. You explain to them.

AI is also supporting now. Most people are into AI because of the benefits we get, and it enables changes required through AI easily. It offers a lot of cost benefits and enables faster productivity. Normally, there are specific people we use to contact, who actually do the automation. No, I cannot decide a rating right now.

We used Automation Anywhere to automate three SAP projects.

We implemented Automation Anywhere to update company code levels with a new general ledger and profit and loss accounts. This update was based on conditions involving multiple P codes and SAP instances.

Previously, updating the general ledgers across multiple SAP instances was a manual process, but it has since been automated.

Automation Anywhere is easy to learn, with a dedicated certification that takes one month to complete. However, to gain sufficient practical experience, users typically require at least six months to work on automation projects.

Automation Anywhere has helped save costs by, for example, doing the job of two full-time employees.

We have integrated SAP desktop automation, Web applications, and ServiceNow with Automation Anywhere.

We use ServiceNow APIs to manage tickets, not the application itself. All actions, including updating ticket details, processing, and adding comments, are performed through the APIs. If processing is successful, we update the ticket comments via the API. For any issues, we attach logs and update the comments with the error message before closing the ticket, all through the ServiceNow API.

Automation Anywhere has helped save costs and time and has reduced the number of human errors.

The Automation Anywhere interface is user-friendly, allowing even new users to grasp the basics within a few hours. While I haven't used Blue Prism, its interface appears more complex. Other automation tools also present a steeper learning curve than Automation Anywhere.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface. When updated packages are available, we receive demos and can practice the automation in the portal.

Automation Anywhere's frequent updates are unnecessary and disruptive. Updates are often pushed for no apparent reason, even for perfectly functional packages. This excessive update frequency is undesirable and should be reduced.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for two and a half years.

I would rate the stability of Automation Anywhere eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Automation Anywhere seven out of ten.

The initial deployment is straightforward. We move code from private to public in a zip file and provide it to the developers. It takes approximately ten minutes.

I have heard that Automation Anywhere is expensive.

I would rate Automation Anywhere eight out of ten.

Our client is an enterprise business.

Two leads and three support people are required to maintain Automation Anywhere. Once we develop the bot, we hand it to the support team.

We have approximately 2,000 users of Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere helps automate routine tasks, freeing employees to focus on other areas, and can even automate processes with underdeveloped back-end systems.

The use cases depend on the group functions that are in our business units. They are related to finance, procurement, and marketing spaces. This is where we are heavily utilizing it for productivity gains in terms of FTE realization.

It is an enterprise-grade tool for us. At the COE level, we are using it for automations related to the group functions. We have a comprehensive team of around 30 to 40 people supporting it. It is not used for one or two use cases. It is a proper enterprise-grade automation mechanism for us for different areas. On average, we do a couple of million dollars of automation engagements annually with it.

It meets the productivity targets that we have set for ourselves. The customer service that they provide is also quite efficient. They try to keep a close eye on our key problem areas and how they can be a partner in solving it. It has always been a very positive collaboration with them.

The integration of automation into our workflows, APIs, business applications, and documents with Automation Anywhere is quite good. It is quite seamless and scalable. They are certified. We can only adopt it if it is a certified integration.

Automation Anywhere has helped save time and cost. The savings are tangible and recorded with us.

The core RPA service that it provides and the stability that it has in maintaining that as a cloud service solution is a key enabler for us. Its stability is good, and the low-code/no-code setup that it has is very user-efficient.

The AI centricity is a bit behind compared to the way we see Microsoft and AWS doing it. This is the feedback that I have also given to them. They need to expand themselves to provide more services than just RPA. Only RPA may not be enough for us, and it would not be our preferred choice for an automation tool.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for around three years.

It is quite stable. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

Its scalability is quite good. It is much better and improved now. I would rate it a seven out of ten for scalability.

It is being used by multiple departments at one location. It is being used purely at the group functions level such as finance, supply, and marketing, but not for the asset-centric operations with mining and other things.

They are quite good. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We are using both Automation Anywhere and Power Automate Desktop for different purposes. Automation Anywhere is our COE tool, whereas Power Automate Desktop is our citizen developer tool. We have good experience with both of them, but we are trying to make a switch from Automation Anywhere to Power Automate Desktop as a part of our cost-efficiency drive. We are doing a competitive analysis to see whether we are ready for it or not.

Overall, Automation Anywhere has been stable, especially the latest versions, but its usage is expensive for us. Power Automate Desktop is our preferred tool.

Our business users who are not technical are more comfortable with Power Automate Desktop than Automation Anywhere. Automation Anywhere is a COE-grade tool. It is not for citizen developers. Automation Anywhere is easy for professional developers or someone who has experience with automation technology. It would take a non-technical person a month of hands-on experience to learn it.

The deployment was good, but the migration to the cloud was a bit tedious. It was an extensive engagement.

The upgrades are quite seamless now because it is now in the cloud, so the effort is quite less. We have a team set up for maintenance.

A team of around 20 people was needed because it was a big-scale implementation. In migration, 25 to 30 people were involved. We have a DevOps team for operational support with almost the same number of people.

We have seen ROI for our original automations. They were mostly low-hanging fruits with savings of a few FTEs, but the moment any automation has an ROI of only one FTE, it is not an economical solution for us to use. Power Automate Desktop is cheaper for us to use.

Its usage is expensive for us because my user base is mostly in Manila and KL. The unit cost of labor is cheaper there than in the U.S. or Australia, which puts a bit more stress on how to get a positive ROI while continuing to use it.

I would rate it a six out of ten for pricing.

I would absolutely recommend Automation Anywhere. It has great potential. The people who provide services are quite professional. They want us to succeed in our journey. They are not only interested in profits. They want us to do well. 

When it comes to automation and AI, there is a huge appetite at the group functions level but not much on the asset side of it. We are more focused on health and safety, and from the functional or transactional aspect, we have a keen interest in the overall automation and AI.

Overall, I would rate Automation Anywhere a seven out of ten.

Some of our use cases for Automation Anywhere have been embedding automation into our AML process and Anti-money laundering process as well. Also using automation to navigate some of our legacy applications to extract information from the UI.

The challenge we're trying to solve with Automation Anywhere is extracting information from our legacy applications. We do not have exposed endpoints. We have to use Automation Anywhere to be able to navigate and extract information for customers and from data information as well.

The processes and tasks automated by Automation Anywhere are a little bit more detailed. What we've come to figure out is the processes previously were not documented correctly. And Automation Anywhere allows us to get more insight and documentation out of our processes.

One of the immediate opportunities we see to leverage AI within our processes and our operations is customer service. Leveraging the natural language models and human response to be able to generate customer-focused responses is something that we plan to leverage very soon.

Automation Anywhere has improved our organization by allowing our resources to focus on the task at hand that impact our customer, while we use Automation Anywhere to replace some of the redundant work that some of our users and internal team members are facing.

Our company approach to generative AI for Automation Anywhere is more in line with building the future, allowing us to enhance our processes without necessarily embedding our internal team members with redundant tasks, allowing them to focus on the actual deliverables of a business versus generating a response to email or reading email. Allowing them to be a more human-focused team member.

Looking into Automation Anywhere in terms of the relationship with AWS, we manage our servers locally for our VMs and are looking to migrate to AWS. The partnership with AWS will allow us to integrate some of our processes and allow access to some of our DVs. This will be a good improvement for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use for people who don't have experience because it is a no-code solution and is user-friendly in terms of being able to generate automation with a plethora of available tasks and variables.

One or two automation walkthroughs of the actual process are required to learn Automation Anywhere. It takes a short amount of time for a user to get acquainted with Automation Anywhere. There are some latencies with being able to expose certain things such as APIs or establish a certain connection, but building automation is short in terms of development.

We have a few tools that are integrated with Automation Anywhere. We use a lot of Microsoft tools. Azure AD is integrated directly with Automation Anywhere and allows us to expand our ability to automate processes. We also have some desktop applications and some proprietary software that we would like to integrate with Automation Anywhere.

Automation Anywhere is a robust platform that allows us to make multiple connections and scale horizontally across the actual environment to give us a more robust integration or automation that allows for downstream impact whether it is internal users or external users of our products. It allows us the ability to go horizontally fast with a lot of multiple integrations of products.

Automation Anywhere has helped us save time and costs, sometimes in the same automation as well as replacing some of the redundant tasks. Some of our users are giving us the ability to scale quicker without adding additional resources. That saves costs. We save hundreds of hours with some automation and two to three hours for others, but the cost impact of being able to do that with automation has saved a ton of costs as well. We have a lot of bots running daily, manipulating and removing the redundancies of those manual tasks. The resource costs saved equal hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The feature we found to be the most valuable is the documentation automation as it allows us to focus on the actual important piece of building automation instead of tracking some of the repugnant documentation that goes along with building automation. 

Automation Anywhere's network has room for improvement. Expanding its partnership with a few other vendors. The likelihood of including companies like AWS, Google, and things like that is the exact approach to what I think Automation Anywhere can improve on. It allows business users who participate and are clients of those vendors to a seamless process integration with Automation Anywhere. This allows for an ecosystem that supports a more robust development of automation because we get a broader use case amongst multiple users of the same product.

I have been using Automation Anywhere for four years.

Automation Anywhere allows us the ability to scale across multiple platforms and in different volumes. At a small scale, we don't have to readdress that automation or that bot to be able to scale if configured and built correctly. It is a very scalable approach that we can take in terms of the integration that we have access to. It allows for an open platform to be able to scale.

The technical support is user-friendly. They are responsive and normally respond within 24 hours. They provide us with updates so we are not left in the dark and keep us involved. They make sure to follow up with a call if anything is needed.

Positive

We did not use any automation beforehand but we have a partnership with Workato that allows us to leverage more API-driven automation as well. We utilize both due to the actual diversity of Automation Anywhere. It gives us the ability to navigate a UI, a more legacy application whereas Workato gives us the ability to connect APIs. We use both of them in the same automation platform.

It took us a month to deploy. We set up a few runners or virtual machines to be able to do that work with our IT team who configured some of the runners and made sure that we embedded applications that were gonna be useful and practical for the actual automation itself. We then walked through a few test automation and were able to deploy our first automation within a month.

Automation Anywhere pricing and licensing are competitive compared to the other automation vendors. Automation Anywhere gives us a platform to scale quickly without embedding a lot of costs on our end. It is reasonably priced.

We evaluated the landscape of automation and the partners and vendors that offer the service before we chose Automation Anywhere. My positive previous experience with Automation Anywhere helped make the decision a lot easier for us.

Automation Anywhere is easy to use. It is a simple platform to understand. A simple platform to roll out. We don't need a robust education in terms of automation. We can train internally. We can expose other POs or PMs to the actual application and they will be able to give us additional insights of automation that we can improve.

The con is the resources assignment outside of our internal team members. Finding resources who have good experience variant with Automation Anywhere in the States may be a con for us.  

I would rate Automation Anywhere nine out of ten. From what I have seen, they are headed in the right direction to get a ten.

We do not currently use Automation Co-Pilot, but we are excited to start using it. We are going to have a session about using Co-Pilot with our internal teams.

Upgrading Automation Anywhere is simple in terms of the control room to be able to do an upgrade or speak to our account executive to get additional licenses or products added to our instance.

Maintenance depends on how we build the automation. We keep in mind the actual process of being able to manage automation as we build it, which will ultimately save us a call for maintenance at the end. Being able to enable notification error handling within the automation helps reduce the actual maintenance requirements for automation.

Not many people are involved in the maintenance of our automation because we embed some of the process owners into the process so they are aware if a bot was to fail. Then we give them corrective actions in terms of exception handling to be able to oversee that bot as well as to reinitiate a bot or add additional variables into the bot to allow the success of that bot. A minimal amount of people are required for bot maintenance.